CHAPTER 11
Creating a Company Culture of Stepping Up
If you treat people like adults, they will act like adults.
Dennis Bakke, former CEO, AES Corporation
Almost all leaders in every company want their people to step up. We want them to act like owners, to have an “it’s my job” attitude, and to go beyond whatever their formal role is to take leadership. Parents wish their children would step up and act more responsibly, and teachers want students to step up to the plate. Governments, except those run by autocrats, know the benefit of citizen involvement in solving the great challenges that face them. Having a company, school, or community full of people stepping up can be a game changer. Here are some examples.
Take Harley-Davidson. The company has been making motorcycles since 1912 but by the mid-1980s it was on the brink of bankruptcy. When Harley was almost broke, a group of former executives made an offer and bought the company. In most such crises, companies become more hierarchical. The leaders go off to some hotel, eat shrimp cocktail, make decisions, and come back barking orders. But at Harley, the new owners took a different path. Rather than bark out orders, they asked their people to step up and become leaders. They engaged them in making decisions, asked them to step up and look at their role in making the company successful, and made them a part of the leadership team. They opened up the books and showed everyone what their competitive position was, including that their quality and productivity were considerably lower than their major competitors’. As the company treated people like owners, people started to act like owners. The company’s turnaround in profits and market share within four short years continues to make it one of the greatest success stories in modern American business. While the company’s star has lost some of its shine because of an aging demographic of Harley customers, its almost two-decade success story following that shift of mindset is legendary.
WestJet is a great success story in Canada and one of the fastest growing airlines in the world. Its whole culture was built on the premise “because owners care.” In an industry known for its toxic relationships with employees and its unrelenting punishment of shareholder’s wealth, WestJet bucked both trends. It created a place where people at all levels regularly step up and act like leaders while profits grow. WestJet pilots often pitch in to clean airplanes, pack up bags, and do whatever it takes to get a plane in flight on time. It is no accident that the company grew from 0 percent to over 33 percent market share in Canada in just over a decade. WestJet also serves as a cautionary tale about creating an ownership culture. In recent years, insiders say that the culture of ownership has shifted somewhat to a more hierarchical style, which was partially responsible for its pilots choosing to unionize for the first time in 2017.
Schools can also create a culture of stepping up. The success of KIPP in the United States leaves little doubt that things change when you ask people to take responsibility. I asked KIPP’s founders how much of the program’s success had to do with longer hours in the classroom and how much had to do with character development, that is, getting kids, parents, and teachers to step up. They told me “51 percent is character development,” an imprecise guess at what almost every leader knows. By telling students that there are no shortcuts, KIPP teachers let students and parents know that they must first look at themselves and what they can do rather than looking to others to accomplish their goals.
The results of having a company or school (or family) where people act like owners may be evident, but how to create such a place is another story. I have spent a lifetime helping companies and schools create cultures of responsibility, which is why I wanted to ask leaders who had created those kinds of cultures how they did it.
Give People a Seat at the Table
Don Knauss is the former CEO of Clorox, one of the most successful consumer products companies in the world. Don was an officer in the US Marines and did stints in leadership at Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble, and Frito-Lay before joining Clorox. When I asked him the secret to getting people to step up at work, he had a straightforward response: “People will not step up if you don’t give them a seat at the table.”
At Frito-Lay, Don was put in charge of a group that delivers and sells chips and snack products in a region in the southern United States. His region was the worst in the country in just about every metric, whether sales per route or amount of product breakage (which basically means the amount of product that can’t be used due to damage). Don told me, “The place was filled with tough old drivers who people had given up on years ago. I guess they figured if I could handle Marines, I could handle these guys.”
When he took over the region, Don began with two key activities: he told people in the region that he wanted them to go from worst to first, and he gave them a seat at the table. He demonstrated what he called a prevailing optimism, the belief that things could change. Like many others who have stepped up and made things better, he was naïve enough to think he could take this group from worst to first, in spite of the drivers’ track record.
“When I took over running that region, one of the first things I did was walk around and talk to the route drivers, one on one, even the old guard who had been there for years and were very entrenched,” he said. “I asked them for their ideas on how we could make things better. Of course, I had ideas, but I knew that if they didn’t have a seat at the table they would not step up. They shared their ideas and suddenly felt like they were part of things.” He started implementing many of their ideas and giving them the credit for it.
Another thing Don did was to force responsibility back on the drivers. He set up a weekly scorecard so that each driver knew how he or she was doing on all the key metrics—sales, breakage, and so on. Then he asked the drivers to meet once every week to go over their scorecards. There was no blaming and shaming, just a chance once a week to compare their performance with others and share ideas for improvement.
Within twelve months the group had achieved Don’s vision and gone from worst to first. Later the region won the Herman Lay award for one of the best performing groups in the entire company. Don is humble about his role in that success. “All I did was give people a voice and create a vision that things could be better,” he said. “They made it happen.”
Years ago, while flying on a business trip, I witnessed the power of giving people a seat at the table. I sat next to a somewhat grumpy middle-aged man. We struck up a conversation and when I told him I wrote books about creating soul in business, he expressed a great deal of skepticism. But when I told him the secret was showing you care about people and giving them a voice, he perked up. He then told me he was the head of the maintenance workers’ union for the airline we were on. He said one of the facilities had the lowest quality, worst productivity, and highest number of grievances in the company. The airline replaced the director of the facility with a new leader who spent his first month walking the shop floor to get to know employees as people and to ask for their ideas on how to make things better. Within six months they had the best quality and productivity numbers in the company.
Many leaders are afraid of letting people have a seat at the table because they think frontline people will make the wrong decisions, but this fear is misguided at best. Joanne Beaton’s story about taking a dying business at TELUS and turning it into a major profit center was featured earlier in this book. An interesting element of that turnaround is that her first act when she took over operator services was to meet one on one with hundreds of employees. She asked them what they would do if they ran the business and what they would do to put TELUS out of business if they were the competitors. She needed people to step up, to become more productive, and to improve customer service, but she began by inviting them to take responsibility. She gave them a seat.
As part of the research for this book, my publisher and I surveyed four hundred professionals across North America by email to ask them, What do leaders do that keeps people from stepping up? The top answer, selected by 64 percent of respondents, was “leaders making decisions themselves instead of involving others.” Although it was not a scientifically selected sample, respondents represented many sectors including both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. We gave them six choices (and also allowed them to write in their own reasons) and asked them to choose their top two selections.
Given the overwhelming desire by employees to have a seat at the table, what exactly do leaders fear that causes them to make decisions without consultation? Joanne Beaton countered the idea that employees will make bad decisions: “Most of the time, given the same information, people will make the same decision as the leader would make. The difference is that when THEY make it, they are much more likely to step up and take responsibility to make the change happen.”
Giving people a seat at the table can change the entire culture of a company. In 2008, Darren Entwistle, the CEO at TELUS, formally endorsed a concept called Fair Process across the entire company. Fair Process was designed to ensure that employees were engaged in, and having input into, decisions that affected them. Josh Blair, former TELUS executive vice president for human resources, said this shift has “encouraged employees to step up across the company.” Inviting people to have a seat at the table as a formal way of doing business can pay big dividends and may help explain some of the organization’s stellar success.
In part, that shift to greater ownership helped TELUS go from midrange employee engagement to best in class in one survey cycle. The survey company communicated that almost all the gains in engagement were in business units where team members had experienced a shift to greater involvement in decisions that impacted them.
A Seat at the Family Table
This same seat-at-the-table principle can be applied in the family. Let’s say your teen behaves in a way that concerns you and that calls for some kind of consequences. Imagine if you sat down and gave the teen a seat at the table. Believe it or not, I think in most cases the consequences teens suggest might be aligned with yours or even more severe, but imagine the difference in how they might receive it.
A friend told me that her daughter had posted what my friend considered to be inappropriate pictures on Facebook. The mother could have easily ordered the girl to take the photos down. Instead, she gave her daughter a seat at the table and invited a conversation about what those pictures might say to boys about the daughter. My friend listened deeply, asked good questions, and occasionally led the witness. In the end, her daughter reached the conclusion that the photos were inappropriate. The conversation wound up being a teaching moment, not just a conflict. Her daughter thanked her for engaging in a conversation. The pictures came down by the daughter’s choice.
Now don’t get me wrong; if it had been my daughter and I felt the pictures were inappropriate, in the end the pictures would come down whether she agreed or not. If the drivers had said, “Hey, let’s stay worst,” Don Knauss probably would not have gone along with it. The point is, as Joanne Beaton told me, most of the time people (including our kids) will come to the same conclusion we do when we give them a seat.
To Get Responsibility, Give Responsibility
Leaders talk a great deal in the business world about the desire for people to be more accountable. The problem is that we really want people to be more responsible. We don’t really want to have to watch over people; we want them to voluntarily step up.
One way we create a place where people act more responsibly is to give them more responsibility. That is, if we tie people’s hands, they have no reason or need to take personal responsibility. As Dennis Bakke, the former CEO of the AES Corporation, once told me, “If you treat people like adults, they will act like adults. But if you treat them like children, then they will act like children.”
Let’s take as examples the Ritz-Carlton and the Four Seasons, two of the best customer service hotel chains in the world. At both chains, associates routinely have a large amount of cash at their disposal to create a memorable guest experience and a fair amount of leeway to take action without managerial permission. At the Ritz, associates in even the lower ranking jobs, such as bellhops and housekeepers, have up to a thousand dollars at their discretion to use to create a great experience or thrill a guest. A simple example involved a disabled guest at a Ritz-Carlton resort who was attending a wedding that was to be held at the beach. When staff found out she could not access the beach, they built a platform so she could watch. The platform cost hundreds of dollars to construct, and the managers did not hear about it for days. Clearly, the companies want people to step up and take leadership, and both chains have many stories about people doing just that. But you might wonder how a hotel chain can risk giving people so much discretion.
The answer is quite simple and goes back to Dennis’s comment: people who are given responsibility tend to act responsibly. If we want people to step up, we have to have the courage to give them a chance to stumble, to learn, and to grow. They may sometimes go too far, but by giving them power we encourage them to act like leaders.
At WestJet, gate agents and other team members have lots of power to do things right on the spot without asking for permission to please any unhappy customer. Not surprisingly, customers love knowing that frontline people can step up and make things better when there is a problem. But Ferio Pugliese, the company’s former executive vice president of people and culture, told me about a time when a new agent had gone too far, giving out loads of free tickets for a short delay that amounted to a small inconvenience for customers. In some companies she probably would have gotten reprimanded for wasting company dollars. Instead, Ferio said, “We held her up as a good example and then we coached her on how she could do even better next time.”
He told me, “The best way to get people to step up is to have spontaneous positive reinforcement for people when they step up and take initiative. The moment you hint that it is not desirable for people to take initiative or step out of their role, then it won’t happen again.”
It is also amazing how quickly a culture can turn around when we give people more responsibility. Delta Air Lines was once one of the most loved airlines in the world. Filled with southern hospitality, team members had lots of leeway to do the right thing for the customer. Then a series of bean counters became leaders of the company and limited employees’ ability to act. Service levels declined and the reputation of the airline suffered.
In recent years, however, service has improved and Delta is often at or near the top of customer rankings. It was even rated in 2018 as one of the most relevant companies in America as defined by positive social media buzz driven mostly by employees. While I have never worked for the company, I have noticed the difference and wondered what happened. Then about six months ago I had to cancel a business trip. I had booked two one-way tickets, so I would incur a two hundred dollar penalty for each ticket. Without any prompting the young call agent said to me, “You know, if you had booked a round trip you would only have to pay one penalty, so I am going to waive the extra penalty.” I thanked him and said, “It’s great that Delta lets you do that without having to ask for permission.” He said, “I have only been here two years, but that is what I love about working here. They let me do what is right for the customer. They empower me to act and I love it.”
Getting people to act responsibly by giving them responsibility even works in a family. The sixteen-year-old son of my friend was addicted to high-end clothing, often paying large sums for name-brand sunglasses and T-shirts. His parents got tired of the constant requests for money for clothes, so they decided to give their son the responsibility to manage his own clothes budget. They decided how much they could afford to spend on clothes for him each year and gave him the money in two lump sums in January and July. They said, “Here is your clothes allowance for the year. You can spend it however you want, but if you run out, we won’t give you any more money.” Suddenly, their son began shopping at discount stores and bringing home five T-shirts for the price he had been paying for one name-brand shirt. Given responsibility, he acted responsibly. Think of all the ways this could be applied in a family, in a school, or within a business enterprise.
Some Surefire Ways to Keep People from Stepping Up
As research for this book, we asked hundreds of people to tell us how leaders keep people from stepping up. They provided a list of surefire ways. As noted earlier in this chapter, the first and surest way is to make decisions without asking for people’s input. Sometimes, it is leaders’ reactions to people’s ideas that matter, which explains why the second most cited (38 percent) thing that leaders do that keeps people from stepping up is “dismissing ideas before exploring them.”
Howard Behar was the focus of the Starbucks Frappuccino story I shared earlier in this book. Behar told me the story of a guy who worked for a doughnut chain and sent a memo to his company’s president. In the letter he shared a quantity of highly constructive ideas on how to make the restaurants better, how to improve the menu, and how to win loyalty from customers. The man showed Behar the letter he received in response from the company president. Filled with management jargon, the letter basically said, “Thanks for the ideas, they won’t work, we have tried them before, you don’t have your facts straight, write again soon.”
Behar said to me, “Do you think that guy is going to step up and share ideas again?” The guy not only was disappointed but also felt his efforts had been totally ignored. Maybe not all of his ideas were workable, maybe some had been tried before, but the moment the president dismissed his ideas or appeared to not take them seriously, the man, just like most people in similar situations, decided to go back and play the part the company asked him to play. In this case, the man who had written the memo to his CEO as a committed and eager employee now was deflated and soon, perhaps, would join the ranks of cynics.
People do not need many of those experiences before they pull inside their shells like a turtle. Mark Twain once observed that a cat that jumps on a hot stove won’t jump on another hot stove any time soon, but it won’t jump on any cold stoves either. As leaders, we need to know that every time we discourage someone from stepping up that person is far less likely to step up again. Brigid Pelino, the senior vice president of human resources at Economical, told me that leaders have to be very careful how they respond to people’s ideas: “The moment you say ‘clear it with so-and-so’ or ‘we have tried that before,’ well, people shut down.” She went on to talk about the importance of keeping an open mind. “Don’t be so quick to judge, turn off the mouth for a while, and take the ideas in before responding,” she advised. I teach leaders a simple method.
Thank You; Tell Me More
Over the years I have discovered some important ways to train leaders to respond more openly to ideas. Let’s say someone brings you an idea—for example, a way to have better meetings in the company. Your first response to any ideas should be a hearty thanks: “Thanks for caring about our success.” Sadly, the thanks is all too often followed by the dreaded word but. “Thanks, but that won’t work.” “Thanks, but we tried that once.” “Thanks, but someone else is working on that.” Instead of “thanks, but” try this: “Thanks; tell me more.” In other words, get curious and show interest.
Explore the idea, learn what the person has in mind, find out how it might work. If you aren’t convinced, you still want to treat everyone like an owner. Instead of saying “That won’t work,” you can say, “I see merit in your idea but have a few concerns.” Once you share those concerns, you can ask, “What are your thoughts?”
Of course not every idea will be a Frappuccino idea, but here is the key point. If you dismiss the not-so-great ideas, there is a good chance that when the Frap idea comes along, people may not even share it. Behar told me the biggest lesson for Starbucks from the Frap experience is that they had inadvertently created a culture that killed ideas. As Linus Pauling, the two-time Nobel prize winner once said in an interview I saw years ago, “The only way to get more good ideas is to tolerate more bad ideas!”
Praise for Effort, Not Just Results
If there is one characteristic that permeates modern corporations, it would be a pervasive focus on results. We judge people mostly by whether they “made the numbers” and achieved the targets we have set. In such an environment, risk mitigation often becomes the norm. Doing what everyone else is doing is a lot less risky than stepping up and innovating. Risk aversion and people stepping up are simply not congruous. The same can be said in a school: the more we focus on results alone, the more we create an environment where students are not eager to step out and take risks for fear of a harsh evaluation. The report card as it is currently used may actually impede growth, rather than stimulate it.
Let’s go back to Carol Dweck’s fascinating research on mindset. If you recall, she found that children who were praised for effort rather than intelligence were much more likely to take risks on the next task. Perhaps an unrelenting focus on rewarding success rather than highlighting well-thought-out failures and effort creates a climate where people prefer to color inside the lines.
Here is a humorous but telling example. The wife of a friend of mine had been on his case for quite some time about being more romantic. She felt that their relationship had become predictable and boring. After months of her hints, subtle and direct, he checked a book out of the library on ways to be romantic. One Friday night he got home early, prepared a candlelight dinner, and waited, naked, for her arrival. The house was warm, the wine poured, and the dinner ready. When she arrived home, her first words were, “That’s not romantic; that is just stupid.” He got dressed, they ate dinner in silence, and he took the book back to the library.
Now, he might have chosen a different romantic act as his first attempt, and it may be that his plan would seem more romantic to men than to most women. But when she said that he blew it, she guaranteed that he would not step up again. The organizational equivalent of this scenario happens every day. Someone steps up, plays outside the box, and with one sentence gets shut down.
At the end of the day, it is often fear that keeps people from stepping up. Not surprisingly, 33 percent of our survey respondents said that “creating a climate of fear and compliance” is what leaders do that discourages people from stepping up.
Jim Grossette, the former senior vice president of human resources at Agrium (one of the world’s leading fertilizer producers), put it this way: “I’ve been in places where the moment you do something that does not work, you are going to get slapped on the hand. If people fear for their jobs, or that they will get their hands slapped, or that they will be embarrassed or put down for failure, you will never get people to step up. We need to spend more time catching people doing things right and less time on what’s wrong if we want people to step up to the plate.”
In my experience, this environment of fear is often very subtle. It can be a frown from a CEO in a meeting; it can be an idea dismissed so quickly that people feel that maybe their job is at risk for even suggesting it; it can be a well-intended risk that went wrong that gets highlighted in a negative light in front of others. If we want people to step up, a certain amount of risk needs to be acceptable. Stepping up and getting it right 100 percent of the time is simply not congruous.
Leaders need to be very intentional about the messages they send to people. For better or worse, an awful lot of people are boss watchers. When I did a tour for senior leaders in the electronic systems division of Northrop Grumman with Jim Pitts, then the sector president, he told his people, “I hope you are not a boss watcher. I don’t want you sitting around waiting to see which way the wind is blowing before you act. If I create an environment of fear, you need to tell me so I can stop doing it.” Such messages sent with clarity give people permission to step up, especially when followed up by congruent actions.
Perhaps the keys to getting people to step up at work were best summed up by Ferio Pugliese of WestJet, a company that has spent years building a culture where people are encouraged to take initiative, resulting in stellar business results: “People feel safer in the middle of the herd, but that is not where we want people to be. When you consistently recognize and reward people who disturb the status quo and when people know that you stand for that, then you have a chance of creating something interesting. At the end of the day, people step up because leaders create an environment where it can be done safely.”
It’s Not about the Horse
Many leaders seem to believe that the way to get people to step up is to handpick their subordinates, almost as if they believe that people’s capacity to step up is somehow hardwired. My experience has been quite the opposite. Just about every person I have ever met wants to step up, take initiative, and make a bigger difference. Think about the experience of Joanne Beaton at TELUS. The staff at operator services were not the most likely to step up. The same was true of those drivers at Frito-Lay when Don Knauss took the helm in his area, but great things happen when a leader who truly wants to listen challenges people to step up.
In fact, according to Dennis Bakke, when AES, one of the world’s largest power companies, did a worldwide survey of its employees, leaders discovered that employees valued the opportunity to step up and influence their own destiny above almost everything else at work, and that was true in every country the company did business in across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
If you are in charge and people are not stepping up, it may be best to look in the mirror. Years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a leadership camp that involved helping to train horses. On the first day of the camp our instructor bore a striking similarity in both appearance and demeanor to Curly, the fictional cowboy in the movie City Slickers. Within the first hour of our weeklong time with horses, he gave us the most important lesson: “All week long there will be times when the horse will not be doing what you want it to be doing. When that happens, you will be tempted to blame the horse. But I’m telling you right up front that every time you are tempted in that direction, you need to remember that it’s not about the horse! Every horse in here is capable and wants to do what we are training them to do. It’s not the horse; it’s you.”
As leaders, as parents, and as teachers we need to remember this lesson. People want to step up, and given the right climate, they will do so.
Societal Implications
Countries and communities also have a stake in creating a place where people will step up and take responsibility. Whether in small matters like keeping a neighborhood safe or in large matters like solving climate change, we need individual citizens to take action. There are simply not enough police to keep us safe, just as there are not enough sanitation workers to keep the oceans free from garbage. There is little doubt that the financial crisis of 2008 was manufactured in boardrooms and government agencies, but anyone who bought a house without understanding the potential impact of higher interest rates or a slump in prices was equally culpable. Only when we begin to see that individual responsibility is at the heart of a healthy society will we begin to make real progress toward solving the great challenges of our day. Even as I write this the world is in a panic over the COVID-19 coronavirus. A medical professional was being asked during an interview what the government needed to do. After he finished he said, “But every individual will have as big an impact on this situation by washing their hands, keeping their distance, not touching surfaces, and so on.”
This idea came home to me in a very personal way in my city of Vancouver in June 2011. The Vancouver Canucks hockey team was playing in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals against the Boston Bruins. Over 150,000 people gathered to watch the game on large television screens in the downtown core while the teams played at the arena six blocks away. Hockey is serious business in Canada, and Canucks fans had waited almost twenty years for a shot at the championship. Just a year before the city had proudly hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics and had been praised worldwide as a gracious host.
The Stanley Cup game did not go well, and the Canucks took a crushing defeat in their quest to win their first championship. Downtown, alcohol and stupidity combined to escalate fan unhappiness into a series of riots. Crowds overturned and burned police cars, broke store windows, and looted merchandise. The outnumbered police did their very best, but Vancouverites watched their televisions in horror as all that good will from the Olympics went up in the dark smoke that I could see from my balcony.
As I watched the live news coverage, I kept wondering, Why are so many citizens standing around taking pictures of the riots and looting? Why aren’t people stepping up to take action? Often, there appeared to be only a few troublemakers surrounded by hundreds of bystanders. It was not until the next day that stories started to emerge of citizens who had stepped up. A young woman stood by a car that was about to be burned as a crowd taunted her, but she stood her ground. It was not her car.
A shopkeeper watched in dismay on television as stores were looted on his street of business, certain that his store, too, had been badly damaged. Around midnight he got a call from a stranger telling him that his store was undamaged. He asked the man on the phone how he knew this to be the case. The stranger said he knew because he and several other citizens had stood watch by the storefront, keeping looters away. They were not friends of the store owner, and only one of those responsible had ever even been in the store.
The next morning hundreds of local residents showed up downtown in the early morning hours with brooms and supplies to clean up the mess. No one had asked them to come. One mother arrived with her young daughter, both with hands in rubber gloves ready to get to work. When she was interviewed she said, “I just wanted my daughter to know this is what people do.”
To be honest, some good Samaritans did not fare so well the night of the riots. A few got beaten up, and many were taunted. Yet one cannot help but wonder how the night might have been different if hundreds instead of scores had stood together to defend their city’s image. If those who had taken pictures had decided to be active instead of observers, might the night have had a different ending?
The point is that many did step up. They did not see it merely as the job of police or of city workers. They saw a problem and decided they were the ones who could do something about it. Leaders in government must have the courage to challenge people to step up and at the same time give them a seat at the table. Only when we are asked to be responsible will we likely act responsibly.
Ways to Step Up
Build a “seat at the table” leadership style. One of the best ways to nurture this style is to make daily “rounds.” This term comes from health care, where doctors make visits daily to each patient. Leaders should make daily rounds by walking around and checking in with team members to find out what is happening in their lives, ask them for ideas to make work better, and express appreciation for work well done. Some research suggests that making daily rounds increases customer and employee satisfaction up to 25 percent! Other ways to nurture this style include having monthly “make it better” meetings, inviting groups of staff members to have an informal breakfast or lunch with you on a rotating basis, having town halls, and generally making it clear you want people to express their ideas (even if they disagree with yours). Remember, the more we give people a seat, the more they will take it.
Watch your reaction, always. Remember, as formal leaders, we are always on stage when it comes to encouraging people to step up. Even a hint that we want people to “stay between the lines” will shut down innovation. Remember the two ways survey respondents said we keep people from stepping up—not asking for their opinion and dismissing ideas without exploring them.
Praise effort. Go overboard to praise effort as well as results, especially if people go beyond their role and really step up.